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I remember first reading about Last Call (not to be confused with Last Call BBS) in an issue of MacAddict only a few years old at the time. I think my eyes were drawn to it because of the colorful array of liquors and mixers in front of you. It reminded me of some of the edutainment games I played in school at the time, but I can't give a specific title.

For a long time it wasn't playable on SheepShaver (good luck playing it on anything on a modern system despite being also on PC...though it might be able to recompiled easily, more on that later), and having played it I'm not sure about it. It at least takes advantage of your computer's internal clock so you aren't penalized for pouring a drink for someone born in 1985 (in-game), at least playing currently. (If you set the clock back to 2001, expect that to change).

However, short of a few nostalgic titles that I never got that far into (the old Mac game Factory: The Industrial Devolution comes to mind), I really don't like time management titles, and Last Call is one of those types of games and you learn where everything is in the store, and no, you can't rearrange bottles to make them easier for you personally. The issues don't end there. When a customer orders a screwdriver, that's easy, vodka and orange juice, right? Well, you also use the right proportions and the right glass. There's a recipe book on-screen (not included in the game as printed materials) but you can't use the screen real estate to use it beyond 1024x768, and eventually you get penalized for using the recipe book anyway. Unless you're really familiar with mixed drinks from the get-go, the right "solution" in that case would be to just scribble down the game's cocktails (there aren't THAT many) into your own notes (since guides don't exist for this game, GameFAQs won't help you).

So while there's points given for realism (though that doesn't necessarily make the game good), another good question to ask is "are there any 'branded' liquors, something that can be found in any bar anywhere"? Simon & Schuster was too cheap to do that, nothing like Jägermeister or Cointreau. They do however, have Southern Comfort, but nothing to indicate it is a trademark or otherwise had permission from Brown-Forman Corporation, which owned it at the time. I guess when you're obscure enough you can get away with it.

As far as the game engine goes, looking at the files, at least on Mac, appeared to be composed of files from Director and Flash, both products of (at the time) Macromedia. It looks like it actually could've run on browsers, provided you had the right plug-ins and a beefy enough Internet connection. It also seems like an eventual candidate for ScummVM due to its partial Director compatibility.

Last Call was released around the same time as a few other games that kind of carried the same "naughtiness" of other S&S titles released at the same time, with Last Call being M mostly on its focus on real alcohol. Well, that and the dominatrix character, who figures prominently into the cover art and most of the reviews. (As the developer interview below states, no one talked about the flamboyantly gay robot). The "other games" included the likes of Who Wants to Beat Up a Millionaire, Deer Avenger 2: Deer in the City, and Panty Raider: From Here to Immaturity. (By the way, I can't help but notice that the original Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?...the original wildly popular prime-time version hosted by the late Regis Philbin...was owned by ABC, a competitor of CBS...and both Simon & Schuster Interactive and CBS shared a common owner, Viacom. Maybe it was just a coincidence.)

All in all, it's not a great game. It's too harried to really appreciate the atmosphere and needlessly complex, and undermines what could've taught you about the IBA official cocktails as they existed at the time...which based on the Wikipedia article might've been the original idea. An interview given with John Cutler mentioned you would start in "at the local Howard Johnson's" and work up to the New York City bar (though it's unclear if he meant the restaurants, which by 1995 had split with the corporate owners and were in rapid decline, or the hotels, which usually had their own bar and were then owned by HFS). Last Call sounds like a great game for the Obscuritory to cover, with the combination of having poor sales, a quirky concept, and being flawed/overly complex. I'd read it.

FINAL RATING:   

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